mrapacz/targum-corpus

Targum Corpus

Targum is a multilingual New Testament translation corpus with unprecedented depth in five European languages: English, French, Italian, Polish, and Spanish. It contains 657 translations (349 unique) collected from 13 source libraries and spanning 1525–2025.

This dataset contains the public release subset: 307 translations distributed under public domain or open licenses. The remaining 350 copyrighted translations are not distributed but are available to researchers upon request.

Named after the ancient Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible (תרגום, "translation"), the corpus prioritizes vertical depth over linguistic breadth, making it possible to computationally analyze a wide spectrum of historical periods and confessional traditions within each language.

Also available on GitHub: mrapacz/targum-corpus.

Corpus Scale

Language	Code	Total	Unique	Public subset
English	eng	396	208	196
French	fra	78	41	44
Spanish	spa	102	54	29
Polish	pol	48	29	25
Italian	ita	33	17	13
Total		657	349	307

"Total" is the number of translation instances collected across all 13 source libraries (the same translation may appear on multiple sites). "Unique" is the number of distinct translation editions after deduplication. "Public subset" is the number of instances distributed in this dataset under public domain (242) or open licenses (65).

Structure

corpora/
  {site}/
    {iso}/
      {id}.jsonl        # one verse per line
index.tsv               # metadata for all 657 translations
copyrights.tsv          # copyright text and status per translation
book_coverage.tsv       # which books each translation covers
manifest.json           # summary statistics

Each JSONL file:

{"book": "MAT", "chapter": 1, "verse": "1", "text": "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ..."}
{"book": "MAT", "chapter": 1, "verse": "2", "text": "Abraham begat Isaac..."}

book uses USFM 3-letter New Testament codes: MAT MRK LUK JHN ACT ROM 1CO 2CO GAL EPH PHP COL 1TH 2TH 1TI 2TI TIT PHM HEB JAS 1PE 2PE 1JN 2JN 3JN JUD REV.

Metadata

Each translation in index.tsv is annotated with manually verified metadata:

• canonical_id — a standardized identifier for the translation work (e.g. kjv, nkjv). Any version presented under a new name receives its own unique identifier.
• canonical_version — the specific edition or revision (e.g. 1611, 4th edition).
• canonical_year — the year of the specific revision.
• copyright_status — one of public_domain, open_license, or copyrighted.

This canonicalization allows researchers to define "uniqueness" for their own needs: they can perform micro-level analyses on translation families (e.g. the KJV lineage) or conduct macro-level studies by deduplicating closely related texts.

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

# Load a single translation
ds = load_dataset(
    "mrapacz/targum-corpus",
    data_files="corpora/ebible.org/eng/eng-web.jsonl",
    split="train",
)
print(ds[0])

# Load all English translations from one site
ds = load_dataset(
    "mrapacz/targum-corpus",
    data_files="corpora/ebible.org/eng/*.jsonl",
    split="train",
)

Load metadata:

import pandas as pd

index = pd.read_csv(
    "hf://datasets/mrapacz/targum-corpus/index.tsv",
    sep="\t",
)

Source Data

Translations were collected from 13 libraries: bible.audio, bible.com, bible.is, biblegateway.com, biblehub.com, bibles.org, biblestudytools.com, bibliepolskie.pl, crossbible.com, ebible.org, jw.org, laparola.net, obohu.cz.

Citation

This corpus will be published at LREC 2026 (Palma, Mallorca, 11--16 May 2026). Citation TBD.

A preprint is available at arxiv.org/abs/2602.09724.

License

Corpus metadata and derived annotations: CC-BY 4.0. Individual translations retain their original licenses as recorded in copyrights.tsv.